Debate is an art form. It is about the winning of arguments. It is not about the discovery of truth.
– Stephen Jay Gould
Debate is dead, or at least paralyzed from the neck down. Once upon a time I held debate as the great crucible of ideas. Put forth your arguments and see if your logic holds up. The truth will win out, I thought. At the end one man will stand triumph, his ideas enshrined as conquering for his audience. A mental joust, a game of intellectual chess, a war of logic with the stakes being truth. Hogwash. Debate is not what it used to be, if it ever was what we imagined. Debate is not a search for truth but a game of personalities, a contest of barbs and structure where nothing is accomplished but for each man to be congratulated as the winner by their constituency or supporters. Two men enter the public arena and each makes a game of attacking logical structure, inserting personal jibes, and deconstructing semantics. Truth is left at the door.
When we think of debate we imagine the great orators like Cicero and Isocrates standing before a crowd and shaping the lives of their listeners. We imagine great issues being debated by keen minds with sound arguments. Sometimes we even remember a debate as a turgid struggle of good and evil. Yet the realities are lacking. What is it that we have instead? Oneupmanship. Look at any of the recent atheist-christian debates, or any such debates in the last ten years. A Christian will put forth an emotional argument that catches the crowd and the atheist will point out a flaw of logic. Academics are even worse, as one will fling a personal insult and in reply will come a semantic deconstruction. To carry the audience is done through emotion and appeals to authority. To derail a good argument one only has to attack their opponent and let them spend their breath on refutations and righteous indignation.
How can debate survive in the age of instant information? A creationist can read, or here, a well put argument and then go online to find a detailed, though wrong, rebuttal. A politician can put forth information from a study and his listeners can track down another study tailored to counter-act the previous one. Even worse we have an entire generation of those who have all but willingly lobotomized themselves. In a recent discussion on alternative medicine I encountered an individual who used the words “reason”, “facts”, and “evidence” as pejoratives. Creationists and alternative medicine devotees invoke a grand conspiracy. Crackpot politicos call upon heart-string pulling one-liners. Bigots fall back on tradition and mystical devotion to good old King James. Critical thinking is a stone being eroded by the ever higher waves of instant information and propaganda.
Debate is dead, pontification lives on. Out of the rotting corpse of intelligent debate and honest disagreement came blogs. No I am not bad-mouthing blogs, rather I think they have filled a niche carved out by the destruction of old fashioned intellectual joust. Instead of seeing two intellectual giants hashing it out, or trying your ideas against the crucible of the opposition we have single points of view presented as the one true way. Just look at sites like DailyKos, Ace of Spades, and Ray Comfort’s blog. All are just pontification on a particular point of view. Want opposition, to see if the pontification holds water, then walk on over to a blog dedicated to the opposition. It’s as if we walk down a street where every few feet are would-be luminaries shouting their “truths” out loud to no one in particular. If we want a different message or don’t agree, we can find a street-preacher that better suits are sensibilities. Custom tailored truth, delivered fresh daily.
Yet perhaps I exaggerate. Perhaps my own pontification speaks only to internet debate, or to a temporary lull in American intellectual life. One can only hope that debate is not dead, but will one day walk under its own power. I have been swayed by debate once or twice myself, though it is rare. Perhaps the volume of argument has risen but not that of understanding. One can only hope that there is cause to look with favorable eyes on the future. As for myself, I say the present is doomed to idiocy and I’m just going to try and ride it out.